3/16/2024 0 Comments Alfred hitchcock presents theme![]() What they focus on is the sort of thing that academics have a penchant for, often psychoanalysis, with its ever-complicating webwork of infant sexuality, Oedipal rages, anal sadism, castration anxiety, the “family romance” (a misnomer if ever there was one), phallic mothers and penis babies, and other exciting esoterica. ![]() But the possibility that the alienation in his movies is a function of economic and class issues hardly registers. 4 As John Grant puts it, “the notion of ‘class’ is a dirty word in today’s America.” 5 Critics notice the “dark side” of American society, plainly depicted in Hitchcock’s Hollywood movies they discuss the alienation and cynicism, the satire, even nihilism, in his films. 3Īcademics typically discuss everything about Hitchcock, except class-class not in a quasi-cultural sense, but in the technical and Marxist sense of class, with related themes of surplus extraction, alienation, immiseration, and revolution, implied in the term. It is significant that even Lifeboat was accused by some critics of supporting the Nazis. “You generally avoid any politics in your films,” the French director François Truffaut said to him, and Hitchcock’s reply sums up his attitude: “It’s just that the public doesn’t care for films on politics.” 2 He has nothing against it, but it is not what the public wants. It is true that his movies of the war period (1939–45) are conspicuously antifascist, Lifeboat most of all, but the common view is that Hitchcock is essentially apolitical. 1 He made cynical-sounding remarks about manipulating audiences, and he never bothered with deep-level interpretation of his films. ![]() He was proud of his commercial success (and so were the studios that employed him). No one would call Hitchcock a socialist he emphasized that all he wanted was to entertain people-not instruct them. Mervyn Nicholson (mnicholson tru.ca) is the author of Male Envy: The Logic of Malice in Literature and Culture and of 13 Ways of Looking at Images: Studies in the Logic of Visualization, in addition to numerous articles, most recently in .Ĭlass struggle is the last thing most people would associate with Alfred Hitchcock, probably the most famous director of them all.
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